Word: batista
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Batista himself wound up in the Dominican Republic with his wife and one son, his other seven children in New Orleans, Jacksonville and New York. As the news broke across Havana in the early dawn, citizens put on the arm bands of the rebel 26th of July movement and tumbled into the streets, firing pistols and Tommy guns in riotous...
...Start, 81. At the end, Batista, who dominated Cuba off and on since 1933, looked like any tin-pot dictator funking out to save his health and-especially-his chips. The 1956 invasion of just 81 men under Rebel Chieftain Fidel Castro. 32, had grown to take over an island of 6,500,000 with a yearly national income of more than $2 billion from sugar, cattle, tobacco, minerals, tourists...
When Castro's seasick invaders fought past army patrols from a marshy beachhead to mountain hideouts two years ago, their extinction seemed certain. All that was needed from Batista's army, 21,000 strong and well armed, was the simple nerve required to go in and flush them out. The army tried terror instead of courage; it tortured suspects, shipped the dismembered bodies of students home to their mothers. Result: a flood of arms and recruits for Castro...
...that point, Cuban Prime Minister Gonzalo Guell dropped in secretly on Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, got ready promises of a refuge for Batista and his cohorts. In fierce street fighting that killed 60, Guevara whipped a dispirited army garrison of 3,000 men and took Santa Clara (pop. 150,000), the rebels' first big city. A trainload of 150 troops sent by Batista refused even to get out of the railroad cars. Batista was through...
...Scramble. In the dictator's final scramble for safety, ferries, yachts, airliners and private planes were jammed. One Cubana Airlines pilot, at gunpoint, flew 92 refugees to New York just before armed civilians seized the Havana airport. To the Dominican Republic, besides Batista, went Andrés Rivero Aguero, Batista's puppet President-elect, who was supposed to take office Feb. 24. (Another Ciudad Trujillo resident: Argentina's exiled Dictator Juan Perón.) The Jacksonville club included national Police Chief Pilar Garcia, worst of the terrorists, and Army Chief of Staff Francisco Tabernilla, whose unseemly wealth...